Setting up 2 hard disks for desktop

ashishj26 · 02 Jun 2016

Hi friends

I have two hard disks one with 500GB and another with 1TB capacity. I want both of them to connect to my PC. I read that they can be connected primary master and slave configuration. Currently the system is working fine with Windows 7 installed on 500GB hard disk (which is booting up fine). But I am pretty naive in this regard. Kindly give me some tutorial or pointers on how to do so. Following is the screenshot of the BIOS menu for drive configuration.

Regards

RolandJS · 02 Jun 2016

I can't get the image to come up; what is the make and model of your desktop [or is this a laptop with a dual drive bay]? Is the 2nd HD installed yet?

TechnoMage2016 · 02 Jun 2016

In a desktop PC, if you have room for two full size hard drives, setting them up to be seen properly by the motherboard only gets testy if you are still using IDE drives and an IDE only motherboard.

If both the drives in question and the motherboard are SATA I, II, or III, then there's NO problem.
Your bios will start looking for a bootable drive at port #0, then #1, #2, and so on. So just connect the drives to the ports on the motherboard, in the order that you want the computer to boot from them.

There are NO jumpers on SATA drives to worry about, like there were on the old IDE drives.
So, that makes things a lot simpler.

But then you didn't give us any information about your computer or what type of drives you have, so, of course that makes helping you pretty hard.

Good Luck!
TechnoMage

ignatzatsonic · 02 Jun 2016

The "master and slave" relationship with drives does not apply unless you are using a PC that is quite old, probably 8 or 10 years old. With newer technology (SATA), there is no such relationship and all drives are independent.

wasnotwas · 02 Jun 2016

ignatzatsonic said:

The "master and slave" relationship with drives does not apply unless you are using a PC that is quite old, probably 8 or 10 years old. With newer technology (SATA), there is no such relationship and all drives are independent.

Wow - that takes me back. Big blue cables - was that only 10 years ago ? Imagine using the terminology master/slave today . . .

AddRAM · 02 Jun 2016

Just connect it to the system with all the power drained from the motherboard, pull the power cord and hold the power button down for 5 seconds, then touch metal anywhere on the case to discharge any static electricity from yourself. Hook up the 1 TB as normal, connect it to sata port #2 on the motherboard, move the dvd rom to the last sata port so you never have to touch it again. Turn on the PC, it may or may not open a window to browse the drive, close it and open disk management and format the drive, and you`ll be able to start using it for storage. Any problems get back to us with a shot of Disk Management.

How to post pictures.

Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image

How to get to Disk Management:

Click start>right click computer>manage>disk management Once in DM, right click on the 1 TB drive to format it.